I know games where this works just fine. They have not a single word of text on the cards besides the name. Everthing is managed my icons and every icon is explained in all lenght in the rules.

If you have too many icons or features you would need icons for the game is getting too complicated. Only if you a card has a very unique feature you can consider to write it down on the card itself. But that should be the exception and the text should be as short as possible.

I simplified to increased the text size. I can save the fine details of the heroes' text for the rule paper.

The five minifigs thing shouldn't be trouble; minifigs are the source of Actions in the game and if your opponent refuses to field them then they're at a huge disadvantage. I also took out the requirement that they have to be enemy minifigs, so if your opponents aren't taking the minifig cards then you can claim them for yourself and set Zahru to slaying his own allies.

Zahru's Goal does mean that I have to add a bunch of weapons into the expanded pack of 36 cards, but that's not tough. I really should have some kind of mechanic to prevent hoarding though, since there's currently nothing stopping players from simply not playing anything. Easiest thing would probably be a looting mechanic - if I send troops to raid your hand itself, and none of your troops intercept, then I take one of your cards for every die in my attack rating. That means that even with only 5 weapons in the deck, Zahru always has a chance of finding them and taking them, no matter who's holding them.

I'm also going to make the change that Heroes are pulled from the game when they achieve their Goal, and set aside in some kind of score pile.

Wow, those look great so far. I like this, though it's kind of hard to follow the bits and pieces of the rules scattered about in the thread, but I expect that'll clear up once you start making official stuff. Definitely looking forward to more of your drawings though, they look great

Be carefull with abilities like "Attackes twice". These items tend to become extremely powerfull, if you don't add any restrictions to them because they effectively double the damage output of the unit.

The icons should be even bigger. They are the most important parts of the card in terms of gameplay. To save some space on the table you could put equipment behind the minifig card so that only a small frame is visible. That frame contains the important information: the icons (and maybe the name). Everthing else is of lesser relevance. A good example is this game:

The armor has the icons on the left side, weapons on the right and magic pendants on the bottom. That way you can hide most of the card without loosing any relevant info. And you don't have to search long for the bonusses you neend to sum up for the next attack.

knolli wrote:Be carefull with abilities like "Attackes twice". These items tend to become extremely powerfull, if you don't add any restrictions to them because they effectively double the damage output of the unit.

Oh this one's no problem, the weapon replaces the character's attack rather than adding to it. So it's always just two one-die attacks.

knolli wrote:To save some space on the table you could put equipment behind the minifig card so that only a small frame is visible. That frame contains the important information: the icons (and maybe the name).

Smart. I still need to keep the illustrations fairly large on the weapon cards because some of them double as construction elements, but I'll look at increasing the size of the icons.

stubby wrote:Oh this one's no problem, the weapon replaces the character's attack rather than adding to it. So it's always just two one-die attacks.

If you have other cards that give additional bonus (or a hero who uses better dice or several wapons at once), an additional d6 can become a d10+6 quite fast (probably). I don't know the combat mechanics yet, but as far as I can see, the spear doesn't add any bonus damage at all.

stubby wrote:Smart. I still need to keep the illustrations fairly large on the weapon cards because some of them double as construction elements, but I'll look at increasing the size of the icons.

The trick is common in Magic the Gathering, where you put enchantements and equipted items behind the respective creature card in a way that you only can read its name. Usually that's all you need because you have memorized the card's effects.

"Kleine Helden" takes this approach even further. Now all relevant info is at the edges of the equipment card. That way you can stack them in a compact manner and still see everything of importance. More complicated or unique abilities (like the bow's ability to ignore certain defense boni) still have their explanation written on the card, but like in MTG you memorize them once and don't need to reread them all the time.

Since your game bears some resemblance in that aspect, I thought you could use the "inspiration".